I was forced to orchestrate the replacement of Kafka with IBM MQ in a running financial institution because new execs understood it better from previous roles in other companies. Crazy newfangled micro services and event driven architecture freaked them out. Change was across about 50 microservices, maybe 5/6 different tech stacks (SAP, Java, .net, python etc). Had to write the MQ scripts to build up the topic and queue stack because their amazing ops guy deployed prod by taking a backup of dev files and installing it on the prod server as his “installation”, and played whack a mole with whatever errors he got. I don’t know how we survived. Did actually manage to make it a useful change but it was soul destroying. Lost zero messages and delivered zero duplicates, and could roll back anytime. They’re ready for whatever the 90’s throws at them.
Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
171–180 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#172Corporate users of 3G dongles used to rack up enormous charges while roaming. They’d get hit with five-figure bills and complain to their carrier that they didn’t warn them, and often the carrier would end up swallowing the charge, even though they were rarely marking up the costs heavily. I worked on a project with a major carrier to enable companies to monitor and alert on cost overruns, and shut off devices in some cases. But before we launched, the EU basically cracked down on the underlying charges and made roaming far less stressful for everybody. Shame, because we had quite a nice end to end setup that would test real world usage on many combinations of laptops and dongles and ensure everything triggered properly.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#173Working for big tech, our Director wanted to add "ML" to one of our workflows no matter what. He identified a "problematic step" and a team of scientist spent 1 year coming up with a ML model to replace this step. I was asked to deploy this solution in production. When we tested the model (which somehow hadn't happened before) we found that the workflow was 5% quicker, but the results were more than 10% worse, and wa…
Do you think the director was truly convinced AI was a good technical solution despite the evidence? Or is it possible they were participating in an emperor-has-no-clothes situation, i.e. the CEO has mandated all teams implement AI somewhere, anywhere?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#174I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
Just brainstorming, but would it be possible to pull out the MTG-specific portions and make it just an online card game framework where people can make their own cards and rules? If people choose to use it to copy MTG that's on them (see Tabletop Simulator, for example) but they might also use it to create their own new games.
The challenge is that the level of complexity with rules interactions in MtG is absolutely enormous, especially if you want to allow the freeform format, which allows all sets and cards.
Note: You can see all the rules here: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Comprehensive_Rules
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#175Well... I've been programming for something close to 25 years, created a bunch of libraries used by... I don't really know the statistics today, but at the height of popularity there were certainly hundreds of users. I can write decently in a bunch of programming languages, some very popular and some not so much. I've been a teamlead for some years, a department manager.
Today I'm a grunt in a department of a large international company. This department was previously a separate company, but was acquired two years ago. The parent company has very little interest in what our department is doing in general.
But, that's not the most useless part, of course. My boss sucks as a programmer. But, on top of being very bad, he's only worked for this one company where he's today. He has no clue how bad he is because he's never seen anything else. After tasking me with writing some code and not being able to understand it, seeing how I wouldn't use the disastrously bad practices he instituted in his department, he decided to never give me any work that requires writing any code ever again.
It's been close to two years since I've written the last bit of code that went into any of the company's repos :) I've been given tasks that require exclusively painfully boring manual testing. It's even funnier because all those things I'm allegedly testing are, sort of, tested automatically (but automation is so awful that it mostly doesn't work).
I attend every morning meeting (online) and just read the news / Reddit / HN during the meeting. The meetings consist of my boss enjoying himself talk for about an hour. Then me and the other guy tell him that we have nothing to add and wish him a pleasant day.
I haven't opened my work email for months :) The last time I did so was because HR sent some form I had to sign, and they found me in Slack to tell that they've been waiting for my signature for far too long.
To add to the pile: the product our department works on is awful in more ways than I can count. It's hard to decide which part of it is worst, but to give you an example: in one of the recent features the customer asked for, instead of implementing this feature the two developers assigned to the task produced two MS Word documents, one around 10 pages long another one closing on 90. These two documents detailed a DIY process of implementing this feature (by the customer), mostly consisting of shell commands interspersed with terse and vague descriptions. Needles to say there was never any kind of plan for how the feature should be implemented. Product management is, basically, nonexistent where I work.
And then I was asked if I can test it... :D In, like... a few days. Because the mothership company requires publishing a release a month, and that feature has to be in the next release.
----
Hope you feel better about your plight now :)
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#176Some years ago, a colleague literally spent all night in the office, on the 31st of March, implementing clippy for another third party commercial application (not MS Office) that was heavily used by the company and across that industry. He inspired me to take April Fool's seriously. I've since changed industries but last year I jumped on the AI bandwagon with https://chatellite.space and this year a nod to a popular…
Wow, I once added clippy to a website I worked on too :)
It wasn't an all-nighter, though! I used clippy.js, so it was just a few lines!
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#177I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of the entire company, everything passed through it. The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat. When new management took charge, an initiative was started to replace the system with an industry standard solution. Both myself and the…
>The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat
the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is secondary.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#178i once worked for a small startup that had licensed an autocad clone [https://www.intellicad.org/] and were customising it as a low-cost autocad alternative for the indian architect market. the platform itself had a bunch of bugs and performance issues, and i was hired to work on some of the more egregious ones (it was kind of fun, i learnt a lot doing it, but it was an ultimately futile task because we were never going to really compete with autocad. but that wasn't the useless part; i was willing to give that my best shot as long as everyone was realistic about what we could and couldn't achieve).
the useless part came about when the company was clearly going down the drain, and the ceo was desperate to find a pivot. he had a friend who was a chip engineer, and said friend had complained to him about how hard and unintuitive EDA tools were to work with. our man gets convinced that the problem is that "these EDA firms hire scientists and mathematicians, but no one who really knows about UI design, unlike CAD companies", and that if we could hook our CAD product up to some open source circuit simulation libraries we could come up with an mvp that would be clearly so much better to use that we could get funded to develop it.
now i usually take the stance of "okay, you're the product guy, tell me what to implement and i'll get it done", but this time i pushed back pretty hard over what a fool's errand this was. but he had his hardware engineer buddy talking into one ear and the "make money fast" shoulder devil talking into the other, and would not listen. so fine, i took a couple of months to play around with CAD fileformat parsers and electronic simulation libraries, got some very basic circuits working and handed over an MVP which of course went precisely nowhere.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#179Any time you feel useless, remember that it's someone's job to install turn signals into BMWs.
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#180I am writing a solution manual to this textbook, by solving EVERY DAMN exercise and writing it up in latex. It is EXTREMELY time consuming. The actual solution manual is already available online. I might gain an understanding of this field, but I doubt I will ever get an interesting job because of this effort. Unless I revise this stuff, I will forget most of it in a few years. Why am I doing this? Idk. Vanity perhap…
What book? I always thought that doing this with Evans PDE would be the best possible way to learn the subject, but I am not skilled or dedicated enough to do such a task.